Has the South changed?

I remember when I graduated from basic training in the fall of 1966. The Air Force gave me orders to report to Keesler A.F.B. in Mississippi. I was to spend the next year there in Electronics school.  I remember the trip on an old Greyhound bus that took me out of Texas through Louisiana and Mississippi. I remember looking out of the bus windows seeing Blacks still tending cotton fields. This kind of shocked me. I had never been particularly bright and not a good student in school, but this picture still disturbed me.

We arrived at the base during the noon hour and to my surprise the base was only two blocks from a 22 mile stretch of beach on the Gulf of Mexico.  I became excited of the prospect of spending time on the beach. What luck I thought.

I was assigned a school in Radar repair and marched across the flight line every morning to Radar Repairman School. Classes lasted 6 hrs. Every day from 6 am to noon. The entire coarse took a year and 1,170 hrs. of class time.  After school we ate lunch and reported for P.T. from 2pm to 3pm.  We had study time until 5.pm and lights out at 9pm every day Monday to Friday.  We had an unlimited 135 mile pass and could spend our free time any way we wanted.

The city and the beach was a complete disappointment to me and some of my friends. The beaches and water were dirty and the night life was not very fun for Blacks and Northerners. It soon became apparent that we were not welcome  in Biloxi. Jim Crow was still in effect law or no law. It was a scary place to be. In short I spent my off hours fishing in the Back Bay or on trips to New Orleans.  The South did not make me feel welcome and the people were not very accommodating. In short I was relieved to finish my year, in one piece, and get an assignment to California in 1967.

As I sit here in my home watching the debates in South Carolina I wonder if the South has really changed that much. The Dixiecrats are gone replaced by Republicans.  The Civill Rights and voting act did not go down very well with Southerners.

My sister moved to Georgia in 1985 and often told me that her kids went to integated schools and there was little trouble with other races. I believed her until I went to my nieces wedding in an upscale area called Buck Head, north of Atlanta.  As I sat enjoying the wedding I remember asking my wife where the Black people were.  If both of these kids went to school with Black kids their whole life didn’t it seem reasonable that at least one of them had a Black friend? If fact the only people of color I saw all weekend were our servers.

I don’t think the South has changed very much. They still hate the federal Gov. for interfering with their states’ rights and making them integrate their schools. I still do not believe that the upper class has ever given in and still practices segregation.

Sitting here watching the responses of the people in these debates I wonder if it would not have been better if we would would have lost the Civil War or at least let the South start their own country. These people seem so different than me.  Just a couple of thoughts from an old man sitting here watching TV on a cold Saturday night.